Posted on 06/17/2006 10:37:49 PM PDT by 11th_VA
WASHINGTON -- A laptop containing the Social Security numbers and other personal data of 13,000 District of Columbia employees and retirees has been stolen, officials said.
The computer was stolen Monday from the Washington home of an employee of ING U.S. Financial Services, said officials with the company, which administers the district's retirement plan.
The company did not notify city employees of the theft until late Friday because it took officials several days to determine what information was stored on the laptop, ING spokeswoman Caroline Campbell said. The laptop was not password-protected and the data was not encrypted, Campbell said.
The company said it was working with district police and had hired a private investigator.
Police would not confirm the theft Saturday. City officials said they were disturbed about how the data was stored and that the company waited to report the theft. "We are concerned that this information was being managed without protection," said Mary Ann Young, spokeswoman for the city's chief financial officer. She said the district expects details about the incident from ING this week. The company has sent letters to all affected employees warning them of the possibility of identity theft. ING also will set up and pay for a year of credit monitoring and identity fraud protection, Campbell said. "For us, this is very unfortunate," she said. "But we're moving forward, we're very focused and committed to find any other laptops that don't have encryption software and to fix that. This incident revealed a gap."
Two other ING laptops containing information on 8,500 Florida hospital workers were stolen in December, but the employees were not notified until this week, said ING spokesman Chuck Eudy. Neither laptop was encrypted, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
I want the laptop that just flat out Screws every Congress critter and Senator.
I'm tired of the "little people" getting Screwed!
If we follow the Money Backwards... where does it lead?
LOL !!!
I want Hillary's laptop. I bet it has some juicy material...
Like "Democrats Gone Wild: Congressional Summer Break 2004".
Maybe all civil servants should have desktop PCs with no USB ports, floppy drives etc, or even revert to the days of "dumb terminals" .. query only access.
ING is a financial institution - it was civil servants information on the laptop.
ING is so ED.
Any other bright ideas? ;)
Would you like to fix this identify theft episode completely? Just get every SSN of every congressmen and senator and post the name with the SSN. Watch how fast they react then. This is the only way that this mess will ever be taken care of.
As for those with ID theft professions...its time to make it a 30 year mandatory sentence for each ID you steal. Make it a federal crime with huge consequences, and no way for a DA to bargain with the guy. You could put alot of folks out of business and make a strong point that society won't accept this.
And if they won't do anything about it...you might as well start dispensing your own justice to the guy who takes your ID. I'd start out with dumping the guy in the middle of death valley in July...and see if that improves his attitude.
Holy Deja Vu, Batman!!
Holy Deja Vu, Batman!!
Exactly... what are the odds of this exact same sort of theft happening twice -- or is it three times now? A civil servant brings home a laptop full of personal data on ... veterans, taxpayers, whatever... and it's "stolen."? C'mon, this doesn't pass the smell test.
"D.C.Workers"?
Isn't that a non-sequitur?
might be so the "bringing it home" that's the prob, likely some telework component. Building security must work...when did this happen before? Home security must be the problem.
Please tell me that the people working from their homes have encrypted the info.
That should be law. Anyone using others' numbers and info must have it encrypted.
I am a former I.T. director and though I never worked for the guberment, whose standards are expected to be "higher", I would have been fired if any of our employees could have walked out of the building with the kind of data that hundreds of people seem to be carrying home in their "corporate" laptop computers these days.
When someone, authorized, needed to work on or access something remotely, that's all they got - authorized remote access to the systems and applications at our location and that access never let them move the data from our systems to their remote location - no matter what their security level was.
Lost my laptop boss wink wink nod nod have extra cash now.
There have been a lot of unsecured labtops stolen from private homes recently, that for some reason contain long lists of personal information.
I now beleive that many of these are not simple burglaries, but are either: 1) intentional sales of the personal information stored on the laptops; or, b) are the result of long term surveilance of people who take work home on unsecured computers.
Let's see how they like it.
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